Book Forum 2022 design wins prestigious Red Dot Design Award

Creative agency Plai Büro has won the Brands & Communication Design category of the Red Dot Award for its work on the Book Forum 2022 branding. The agency reported this to Chytomo.

“We have created a design system that would interact with the outside world. Its purpose is to tell about the events and the war in Ukraine,” said creative director Radana Renko.

In 2022, the festival had to change its format due to the full-scale Russian invasion. Besides, BookForum also changed the festival’s identity.

The logo lettering, with decorative elements traditional for the Ukrainian font style, was developed on the basis of 25 equal modules, symbolically including 24 regions of Ukraine and Crimea in this concept.

There is also a version of the logo where some letters seem to lose their balance, but at the same time lean on others. “In this metaphorical way, we tried to convey a sense of instability that is close to every Ukrainian today. This is a story about the search for support that we now find in culture, especially in books, texts, public conversations, and discussions,” the agency says.

The font was made monospaced, paying tribute to the self-published books of the 60s. The functional elements of the identity — a circle, books on a shelf, and a Czech hedgehog — are based on the same modular principle as the font, and form a coherent design system. The designers also visually quoted BookForum’s partner, the British Hay Festival.

The agency is convinced that BookForum’s identity does not exist in a vacuum, but rather interacts with the world. With the help of visual language, Plai Büro aimed to explain to the world community what Ukraine and its book festivals are like in times of escalating Russian-Ukrainian war.

You can learn more about the history of the design for the Book Forum here.

The Red Dot Award is an annual design award presented for outstanding design achievements, established in Germany in 1954.

Book Forum is a book fair and Lviv International Literary Festival. It has been held every fall since 1994. In 2018, the Publishers’ Forum changed its name to BookForum and, under the new name, established itself as one of the country’s main cultural festivals and one of the largest literary festivals in Central and Eastern Europe.

As a reminder, in 2022, the project of the Ukrainian startup Awesomic won the Red Dot Award in the Brands & Communication Design category with The League of Information Warriors, which depicts Ukrainian writers as military personnel.

Read also: The American Institute of Graphic Arts has selected the 50 best covers of 2022

Images: Publishers Forum